This, then, was his goal, this superb fabric which the genius of the mediæval age had bequeathed to England and to posterity. No words could rightly have described the emotions which stirred his imagination as he stood to contemplate the jagged line of building and battlement, chapel, tower and stable, which his hand should snatch from the greedy hand of time. The very park, with its soft grasses, and deer in shadow pictures beneath the trees, could conjure up a vision of knights and pages and stately dames and all the witching pageantry of half-forgotten centuries. The great house itself might have been the house of a thousand mysteries, locked in banded coffers, enshrined in ghostly walls—crying aloud none the less to him who would listen to the tongue of their romance. Gavin Ord stood in an ecstasy of homage to worship at the gates of such a temple as this. And, standing so, he heard a woman's cry.
He had walked across the park with slow steps and come to the narrow bridge of five Roman arches which spanned the shallow river—shallow, save for one deep pool over which many a fisherman must have thrown a skilful fly. Standing by the balustrade to contemplate the picture, his delighted eyes traced every tower and pinnacle of Melbourne Hall with an artist's ecstasy—thence looked out over the moonlit park to glades of surpassing beauty and scenes which the centuries had hallowed. How inimitable it all was—the mighty yews about which Elizabeth's courtiers had grouped; the groves which had listened to many a child of Pampinea—the fearsome walls, what tragedies, what comedies, had been played within them! Even a dullard might contemplate the scene with awe. Gavin Ord was no dullard, and the spell it cast upon him was such as he had never known in all his life. So entirely did it claim his mind and will that when he heard a woman's low cry beneath the very bridge he stood upon, he scarcely turned his head or gave the matter a thought.
What had happened; whence came the sound? Being repeated, he could no longer ignore it. In truth, it awed him not a little; for it was not the voice of a woman in danger but of one asking his pity, his help, as it seemed, in a low whispering voice which he now heard more clearly than if a strong man had shouted at him. Taking one quick glance at the river, Gavin declared that the cry could not have come from there. Splashing and leaping over mossy boulders, a child might have waded across the stream, he thought. Then whence did the cry come? Turning about, to the right, to the left, he discovered himself to be still alone. It was the voice of imagination he began to say; and was about to quit the place when he heard it for the third time, and so unmistakably, that he no longer doubted it to be human.
Some one called to him from the river below the bridge.
He climbed upon the old stone parapet and looked down straight to the black silent pool about the arches. So dark was it in the shadows that the keenest eyes might not have perceived a human thing there. Gavin Ord, however, saw the thing as clearly as in daylight—a woman's fair head with great sodden leaves about it and streaming black hair caught up upon the ripples. A shudder of awe indescribable came upon him as he looked. For the woman was dead, he said—had been long dead, and yet her voice spoke to him.
He knew that she was dead, for the water lapped upon her half-closed eyes and the fair head turned slowly as the eddies swirled slowly about it. Every right instinct told him that this was a vision and not a truth of the night. He listened for the voice again; but it was silent now. As it ceased to speak to him, the spell vanished. He ran round quickly to the river bank and clambered over the slippery stones to the pool's edge.
It was black as night and void as the ether.
*****
Gavin Ord was not a nervous man and very far from a superstitious one.
When he had quite assured himself that he had been dreaming, his first act was to return to the path and laugh aloud at the whole venture.
"Melbourne Hall is generous to me," he said; "here are the very ghosts coming out to welcome me."
None the less he tried to remember what he had eaten in the train for dinner and whether his recent nights had been late or early.
"I shall get to bed at ten here," he said to himself, "and put in a good walk before breakfast. I have been doing a good deal and I never was great at night work. Of course, if I told anyone, I should be written down a liar. It's always the case when you hear or see anything the other man has not seen or heard."
He caught up his bag and marched on resolutely up the wide gravelled drive by which you reach the great gate of the Manor. A loud bell answering to his touch awakened splendid echoes in the courtyard of the house and set the dogs barking within. When a footman opened to him, he discovered that Melbourne Hall was a building about a quadrangle and that its main door admitted him no farther than to the great square court of which the chapel and the banqueting hall were the chief ornaments. Above the latter, lights shone brightly in many windows. But the courtyard itself lay in darkness.
"Say that Mr. Ord is here," Gavin instructed the footman, and added: "I am very late, I fear; I was stupid enough to miss the afternoon train."
The footman, shutting the door with a solemn formality, called another to his aid that the dressing case might be safely conveyed to the guest's bedroom.
"'Is lordship was sayin' you wouldn't come, sir. Longish walk by Moretown too. We'd have sent the motor but the 'shuffer' don't like late hours. 'Is lordship is now in the boodore along of the Lady Evelyn. This is Mr. Griggs, the butler, sir——"
Gavin was not particularly interested in the fact; but the butler in question had no intention of being ignored. A fat and pompous man of flat and florid visage, he stood, in majestic pose, at the head of the short flight of stone stairs leading to the boudoir, and his attitude no archbishop could have bettered.
"Mr. Gavin Ord, is it not?" he asked.
Gavin said that it was so.
"We kept dinner back ten minutes, sir—I trust there has not been an accident."
"No accident at all—go and tell the Earl that I am here."
Mr. Griggs looked as though he had been shot.
"James will do that," he retorted loftily—waving his hand as a conductor waves a baton.
The obsequious footman strolled off to do the majestic man's bidding and Gavin meanwhile found himself in the banqueting hall, an old Tudor apartment he had admired in many pictures but now entered for the first time. The banners of three centuries hung in tatters from its oaken ceiling; the musicians' gallery stood as it was when fiddle and harp made music there for the seventh Henry, but Gavin resented the fashion of electric lamps none the less and instantly resolved to change them—in which intention the fat butler interrupted him with the news that the Earl awaited Mr. Ord in the long gallery.
"Her ladyship is there too, sir. Perhaps you will be taking supper afterwards."
"Nothing to-night," replied Ord quickly; "I shall dream enough in the old house without that."
"And I dare say you will, sir. Many's the night I've seen a something, though I couldn't rightly say what it were."
Gavin judged that it might have been a flask of spirits which thus troubled the good man's dreams; but he made no comment as they mounted a broad staircase, and passing through a dainty little room in one of the turrets of the house, entered the superb long gallery which is the very masterpiece of Melbourne Hall. The vast length